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THINK 55:Understanding China through Film

How did China move from an imperial and colonized country to an independent modern nation? How did the Chinese people transform its tradition, create new ways of life and values, and move toward modernity? What can the films tell us about the most significant events in modern Chinese culture and history?nWe will learn about major social and cultural transformations in modern Chinese through film. We will analyze films as a window on the ongoing narrative of a people making history and responding to a changing circumstances of revolution, reform, political movements, and modernization. Students will study film images as an art that is intertwined with ordinary people, their lived experiences, cultural habit, moral values, and political consciousness. The course will highlight four major periods: the May Fourth New Culture (1919-1930), the socialist era, the Cultural Revolution, and the reform era of globalization since the 1980s. We will learn to be sensitive to film as a visual and dramatic medium that brings to life Chinese history and culture. Mandatory screenings will be held on Wednesdays 6:30pm-9pm.

THINK 57:Progress: Pro and Contra

Where and when did we start believing in human progress? Does progress imply that history has a particular direction or end-goal?nMuch of our everyday thinking about politics, society, and history depends on some implicit or explicit concept of progress. Have we reached a point where we need to replace the idea of progress with that of sustainability? These are some of the questions this course will raise as it looks at how ideas of progress inform western thinking about science, history, evolution, and politics. It will engage with thinkers who argued in favor of the idea of progress as well as thinkers who attacked its presumptions. Reading and critically evaluating philosophical, scientific, and literary texts, we will investigate the different consequences of our residual belief in progress, as well as the consequences of our possible abandonment of that belief.

Last offered: Spring 2018
| UG Reqs: THINK, WAY-A-II

THINK 59:Worlds of Sound: Learning to Listen

We live in a world of sound. In ways that we do not always see, our social practices and machines lead us to understand certain sounds as signal and filter out others as noise. Drawing on thinking from linguistics, musicology, science and technology studies, and literature, this class challenges freshmen to become aware of their own listening practices and to learn how to listen actively and critically. We ask students to think about how listening can give them knowledge about themselves; how it relates to memory and identity; and how it is like or unlike reading. We will then introduce issues related to listening and technology: how technology influences the perception of sound; the perceived lack of fit between noise and an individual's perception of it. Finally, we will address varies cultures of musical listening, the classical Western tradition, South Asian musical traditions, and the listening experiences of immigrant and minority communities.

THINK 60:American Enemies

It would seem that an enemy should be easy to identify, but this course proposes that this involves deliberation, choice, and an assessment of consequences. We will explore modern American experiences in defining enemies, here defined as mortal threats to the state and the national collective. We will focus on ideas, thinking and assumptions rather than historical chronology. Who are enemies? How are they defined and by whom? How are enemies characterized and perceived? The narrative content of the course would be a historical study of the American engagement with enemies from 1942 to 1990. We will begin with the war or terror, return to consider the experience of the Japanese enemy of World War II, and then come up through the years of the Cold War and beyond.

THINK 64:Healing, Illness, Stories

This course focuses on multiple genres of narratives about illness and recovery: memoirs, graphic novels, poetry, fiction, essay, and documentary film. It asks what the power, if any, of narrative is in healing. Drawing upon the fields of literature and the practice of medicine, students will begin to grapple with the power of stories in illuminating the experience of illness and disability and in offering the possibilities for (self) transformation.

THINK 66:Design that Understands Us

What is the nature of design¿and the meaning it holds in human life? Why do we bother to design beautiful things? Is it possible to design truth and conscience into technology? How do we reconcile deep uncertainties brought on by new technology, with the underlying values we hold as humans?nnWhat we make, in turn, makes us. This course examines the nature, purpose, and meaning of design in human life, seeking to understand its underlying universality as an interweaving of engineering, art, philosophy, and a radical synthesis of means-to-ends (things done for the sake of another purpose; e.g., technology) and ends-in-themselves (things valued for their intrinsic worth; e.g., truth, beauty, morality, the idea of play). It explores design as something that both embraces and confronts technology, not purely as means to yet another end, but also in its potential for humanistic meaning, understanding, and poignancy. It examines the idea that we should not always design from practical needs (as we are often taught) but also from the values underlying the needs; that technology should not be only an agent of change, survival, or happiness, but through what we do with it, also a mirror to define our own humanness.

THINK 67:What Makes Music Classical?

This course asks a question that can elicit a variety of responses. Classical music means different things to different people. For some it connotes Western art music of a particular historical era. According to this understanding, classical music follows baroque music and is superseded by romantic music; it develops a style, the classical style, as perfected by Haydn and Mozart. For others classical music has broader significance, referring to a cultural practice that predates the eighteenth century, going as far back as Gregorian chant and extending through the present. There are a variety of factors that define that practice, some more enduring than others: transmission through musical notation, theories of tonal systems, techniques of composition. Formal analysis, though often considered a sub-discipline of music theory and hence purely descriptive and objective, is hardly value free. Aesthetic interests and prejudices come into play, whether implicitly or explicitly.

THINK 69:Emotion

In this course, we address basic issues about emotions and their place in human life from the perspectives of philosophy and psychology. We ask four fundamental questions: What is emotion? What is the appropriate place for emotions in our lives? How should we manage our emotions? Do emotions threaten the integrity of the agent? For instance, in asking how we manage our emotions, students will consider the Stoic view that emotions must be extirpated alongside psychological perspectives on the theoretical and empirical frameworks on emotion regulation.

URBANST 27Q:The Detective and the City

This seminar will analyze the social reality of three historic cities (London in the 1880s and 90s, San Francisco in the 1920s and 30s, and contemporary Shanghai) through the prism of popular crime fiction featuring three great literary detectives (Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes, Dashiell Hammett's Sam Spade, and Qiu Xiaolong's Chief Inspector Chen). As a student in this course, you will explore why crime fiction is so popular, why the fear of crime is so much a part of modern urban culture, and why the police detective and the private investigator have become iconic code heroes of pulp fiction, movies, TV shows, and even video games. If you take this class, you will have the opportunity to write a paper and present your research on one of the classic literary detectives or on one of today's related manifestations of the same impulse in mass-market tales of superheroes, vampires, and the zombie apocalypse.

Casablanca, Algiers and Tunis embody three territories, real and imaginary, which never cease to challenge the preconceptions of travelers setting sight on their shores. In this class, we will explore the myriad ways in which these cities of North Africa, on the edge of Europe and of Africa, have been narrated in literature, cinema, and popular culture. Home to Muslims, Christians, and Jews, they are an ebullient laboratory of social, political, religious, and cultural issues, global and local, between the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries. We will look at mass images of these cities, from films to maps, novels to photographs, sketching a new vision of these magnets as places where power, social rituals, legacies of the Ottoman and French colonial pasts, and the influence of the global economy collude and collide. Special focus on class, gender, and race.